Case Study: How a Mic Giveaway Drove 111 New Subscribers

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I was filling out a contest the other day on a website to win a boosted board and as I was putting in my name and email address I began to wonder if these types of giveaways actually worked from a lead regeneration perspective. I mean sure you have tons of people who want free stuff… But doesn’t everybody want free stuff? If nothing else doing a giveaway would get a ton more people on your list and that would help your awareness if nothing else significantly. It would reach people who would never hear about you that otherwise would have just left your site. I also think it’s a great way to get people interested in your brand for a very small investment. So having said all that I decided to create my own giveaway on Preston’s corner.com to see what the actual results would be for myself.

Relevant Giveaway Product / Service

The problem with most sites that do giveaways is that they give away items that are not relevant to their website audience. It doesn’t make much sense for a tech blogger to give away a year of free Chick-Fil-A sandwiches (even though I love Chick-Fil-A) versus that same blogger giving away the latest and greatest smartphone. I knew that if I was going to do a successful giveaway that it had to be something related to my website content. Since my site is about online marketing, video creation, content creation and blogging I decided to give away a piece of video creation equipment that most people could use. I decided to go with the Rode VideoMic Me since it is a smart phone microphone that most people could probably use and improve their audio quality!

The Giveaway Tech

A lot of my giveaway to be as legit as possible so I decided to use a giveaway software. I didn’t want to mess with Paris and other low-end solutions that wouldn’t really work or even using Microsoft Excel to pick a winner on my own. I researched a bunch of different tools including King Sumo, Rafflecopter, WP Giveaways and Gleam. After exhaustive research I eventually landed upon Gleam. I would need the Pro version which is $39 per month so I grabbed and dialed in the contest settings.

The Contest Details

Okay so once I had all the tech and place it was time to get ready to do the giveaway! In order to enter the contest you had to put in your name and email address. There were other ways to get more entries into the contest including

Sign up for our Video Marketing Newsletter +1

Follow @Prestonscorner on Twitter +1

Answer a Question +1

Subscribe to my YouTube channel +2

Tweet on Twitter +2

Refer Friends For Extra Entries +5

I also created some other ways to get more entries into the contest to improve your chances of winning. I knew that if users could get more entries to win that they would take my desired actions. I wanted to build up not only get more email subscribers but also YouTube subscribers and twitter followers. I also wanted to get some simple customer feedback about user’s biggest challenges in 2017. On that one all you had to do was answer a simple question and you would get an additional entry. Finally, I wanted people to refer their friends to the contest. The reason why I made that action waited as an additional five entries is because I knew that people would not normally share the contest with other people because they didn’t want to dilute their entries. In other words the less people that enter the contest the better their chances of winning but with the refer a friend adding an additional five entries they would be more likely to share.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Here are the final details from my contest. Total cost of the

Cost = $100

755 Entries

428 Actions

110 Users

This contest was worth every single penny! I got more email subscribers, youtube subscribers, twitter followers and most importantly I got some great feedback from the “answer a question” entry option. I asked users what their biggest challenge was for creating videos? This is some valuable feedback and will help me to create relevant and in demand content for the upcoming months. All in all, it was a huge success and I will probably do more giveaways in the future. I might even try to work with some brands to get some free gear to give to you guys 🙂

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